Pages tagged "violence"

Nearly every one of the last nine years has been the deadliest year on record for Transgender people in the U.S. 2017 is no different. The Human Rights Campaign lists 25 murdered Transgender Americans so far this year.

On November 8th, voters had a choice between two pro-capitalist candidates, after a primary season with a viable democratic socialist candidate. Voter apathy after years of economic neglect and racist voter suppression by the GOP took their toll.

He undermines the free press through clear lies and threats. He directs federal agencies to ignore the checks and balances provided by the rulings of the judiciary and re-shuffle to increase his personal power.

The mass migration of children from Central America has been at the center of a political firestorm in the United States. Both migration and deportation increased again in late 2015, causing the mainstream media to run even more stories blaming families, especially mothers, for sending or bringing their children north. President Barack Obama himself lectured them, as though they were simply bad parents. “Do not send your children to the borders,” he said recently.

Among the often unacknowledged side effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the war on drugs are the economic and physical violence they inflict on women, particularly brown and black immigrant women. Driven from their homes, where U.S. policies and practices make it difficult or impossible for them to earn a living, or widowed by the disastrous militarization of the war on drugs, which has killed an estimated 120,000 people in Mexico in the last nine years, or fearing for their lives, as femicide against workers and students throughout Mexico has increased, women go north.

After the recent terrorist attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery store in Paris, France, by men who claimed to be al-Qaeda militants, it didn’t take long for Twitter and the blogosphere to reignite the old debate about whether religion leads inexorably to violence. This debate calls to mind Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek's take on what he calls the “pseudo-revolutionary critics of religion,” who attempt to denounce the tyranny of religion while creating their own kind of totalitarianism. “In fighting religion,” he says, "they are compelled to forsake freedom itself, thus sacrificing precisely that which they wanted to defend.” In other words, people often become the monster they wish to destroy.

As someone who spent a decade in graduate school studying religion, I would be the first to admit that it has what Carl Jung terms a dark, shadowy side. Christianity had the Crusades; the pograms against Jews; the Inquisition; and, in our own country, the theocracy of Puritanism. Islam has political Islam, a perversion of the teachings of the Quran, which inspires in some of its followers the kind of atrocious acts carried out most recently in Paris, France or every day in countries in its thrall. Judaism has its radical adherents who will murder co-religionists or assassinate an Israeli prime minister to bend other Israelis to their philosophy. Hindu nationalists in India have slaughtered Muslims, most infamously, perhaps, in Gujarat, and the leader of the nationalist party, who was chief minister of the Gujarat state at the time of the riots, has been elected president of India. Buddhist monks have been in the forefront of attacks against Muslims in Burma. The shadow side of even the most "peaceful" religions is not hard to find.

Who lost Europe?

Okay, Europe isn’t lost — merely home to a growing number of neo-fascists. The elections to the European Parliament still gave roughly 70 percent of the seats to parties of the center-right and center-left. But most of the rest of that body will be composed of a greatly increased number of delegates from nationalist, far-right parties critical of the European Union and united by anti-immigrant and homophobic bias. A number of these parties are openly racist and anti-Semitic. A few — notably Greece’s Golden Dawn – are effectively neo-Nazi, down to their belief in violence as an appropriate, and apparently satisfying, form of political action.

Today, May 19, Cecily McMillan was sentenced to 90 days in prison for being sexually assaulted by a police officer at a protest, and then responding to that violence by defending herself. We all know that Cecily did not receive a fair trial and this case will be fought in the Court of Appeals.

Join Steve Max, a founder of the legendary community organizing school, the Midwest Academy, to practice talking about socialism in plain language. Create your own short rap. Use your personal experience and story to explain democratic socialism. Prepare for those conversations about socialism that happen when you table or canvass. This workshop is for those who have already had an introduction to democratic socialism, whether from DSA's webinar or from other sources. Questions? Contact Theresa Alt <talt@igc.org> 607-280-7649.

DSA was concerned to find out that the company that provides our website and online organizing infrastructure, NationBuilder, had as a client the Trump campaign and other right-wing candidates. Progressives built this kind of infrastructure and tools for digital organizing and we have now lost that organizing edge. We are moving to identify other options for a CMS/CRM. As an under-resourced, member funded organization, this move will take time for us to carry out, but it is an important statement for us to make.